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Jean Paul Gaultier

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PARIS, June 23, 2011
By Matthew Schneier
The beauty of the showroom is that collections there don't necessarily have to cohere: Editorial and commercial, new and returning, can sit side by side on the rack. That's not true of the runway, where a tightly edited message is a must. For Spring, Jean Paul Gaultier staged a runway show-as-sales appointment (or is it sales appointment-as-runway show?) complete with open seating, dressers stripping and clothing models in full view, and planted "buyers" browsing line sheets and discussing their buys. And that allowed Gaultier to back into a collection that ricocheted this way and that, from Hawaiian print (actually sort of OTT great, and oddly enough, in line with a reigning Hawaii-ana trend this season) to sheers and transparencies to plaids to all-in-ones.

Piece by piece, you could imagine plenty of it selling. And maybe that's the point. Certainly there was good stuff—some of the Hawaiian items, the naval sweaters that closed the show—throughout. But it felt like a missed opportunity, too. Gaultier has just seen a full-scale retrospective of his work open at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. If he was going to cast a wide net, why not take the opportunity to trawl in a few clever reworkings of the greatest hits?

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